It had been ten years since I was last in Berlin and was marveling from the top of the Reichstag’s large viewing terrace at the immense facelift the city has undergone when I heard the collective voices of hundreds chanting screeds alongside the cries of an indecipherable (Ich spreche kein Deutsch) man using a bullhorn coming from the nearby Brandenburg Gate, the border between the old East / West Berlin. Curious, I left the tourists behind me at the refurbished Reichstag and approached the Pariser Platz as the crowd’s chanting crescendoed, erupting into cheers when I passed beneath the gate’s statue of Nike, the Greek Goddess of victory.

Not understanding what they were saying, and despite not having any clear idea what was actually happening, it was quickly clear that a great number of Palestinians, Turks, Syrians (identifiable by their flags) and others were extremely unhappy. I immediately began snapping photos and realized that I was more accepted within the surging Muslim crowd dressed in hijabs and kuffiyehs, felt more at home with the protesters, given free reign to shoot as I pleased by them than the stoic and disapproving police covered head to toe in riot gear lining the perimeter of the square.

Asking a Syrian woman boasting her birth country’s flag, I quickly got the details:

“These hundreds of people are gathered here in Pariser Platz beneath Brandenburg Gate today (Friday, June 4th 2010) to protest the Israeli raid on six ships comprising the the Gaza-bound Freedom Flotilla, carrying more than 600 hundred passengers. They killed nineteen people and injured hundreds. This is unacceptable. They must be stopped!”

Three Youths Hug the Pariser Platz Sign beneath Brandenburg Gate during the Gaza Protest

The attack, which occurred approximately 65 kilometers of the Gaza coast in international waters, has been condemned worldwide and has brought well-deserved attention to what some call at minimum an illegal blockade, yet one that the Likud government spokesman Mark Regev maintains “was totally within its rights under international law to intercept the ship and to take it to the port of Ashdod”. Much more than just another “incident” within controversial areas many are unwilling to wade into, the use of what the majority of the protesters deem to be unnecessarily deadly force against boatloads of international journalists and writers as well as the death of nine Turkish activists, has gotten the attention of Turkey, Israel’s biggest trading partner and up to now, most trustworthy regional ally.

Turkey, which has seemed to usurp the role of Mideast leader of late, may have the power to apply unseen pressure on their their Mediterranean neighbor, possibly more so than U.S. president Barack Obama’s so far unheeded advice to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to lift the blockade against the Palestinians. They meet in Washington on July 6th.

None of the people here were willing to sit down at the nearby Starbucks to discus Israel’s claims to homeland security after the unilateral action by its military, which many of its own citizens condemned as overly harsh.

Just as soon as I had seen a fraction of the new Berlin (without the hundreds of cranes towering above last century’s skyline), where the multi-ethnic citizens use of freedom of speech seemed to equal or greater to anything I had ever experienced, I realized that more than just the usual protest, something massive was being stirred, an immense stand was being taken, with a greater number of countries involved than ever before, one from which we don’t emerge unaffected nor unscathed. I had a train to catch, an article to write and negatives to develop, but more than more of the same supposed unbiased reportage, I had to look deep to see that there was no clear understanding, no simple cut and dried answer, no unaffected people. The problem is growing and more and more people are becoming involved everyday, some violently, even fatally so. I have to ask myself if the answer really lies in more walls, borders and flags.

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Manny Santiago is a photographer / journalist currently circumnavigating the globe. For information on licensing these and other images please contact Magnesium Photos

Text & Photography © Alan Dejecacion / Magnesium

For centuries the Mekong river and its tributaries have been the lifeline to the southeast Asian nation of Laos with its life-sustaining role as trade and communication route. Carving a 900 kilometer border between Laos and northeast Thailand, the Mekong continues to be the main highway for many where paved roads are virtually non-existent. Cut off from major markets by a lack of reliable surface transport (the Mekong is not all that navigable year-round), the provinces and nearby villages along the river banks have developed a small, fragile and largely insular economy of local production and services resting on a foundation of traditional subsistence.

The Mekong swells during the monsoon, bringing silt deposit and nutrients, thus allowing the area to thrive via rich soil for agriculture and great numbers of fish. The richest soils of the country are on the river banks and inland as far as the river silt is carried. For landlocked Laos, the Mekong and its tributaries are the all-important source of fish. In mountain streams, in rivers small and large, in flooded rice fields, people cast their nets and set their traps.

China’s ravenous appetite for hydroelectric power at home and its thrust southward into southeast Asia in search of trade is changing the very character of the river. This is true not only in China itself, but also for the livelihoods of people living downstream in Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

This complex ecosystem, and the livelihoods of millions who depend on it, is threatened by China’s plans to build eight large dams on the upper reaches of Mekong in Yunnan Province. The plan will drastically alter the river’s natural flood-drought cycle and block the transport of sediment. Despite these serious potential impacts, construction of the upper Mekong dams has proceeded without any real assessment of the likely impacts to the river and its people.

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Tokyo “Port-au-Prince is completely destroyed… Things are so bad,” said Jean-Claude Bordes, Haitian Ambassador to Japan, at an emergency press conference today. “I have no words,” he continued, referring to the devastation caused by the magnitude 7.0 quake that hit just outside of the Haitian capital on Tuesday.

The last major quake in the area was over 200 years ago, and the country was completely unprepared. “We are expecting hurricanes every year, but not earthquakes,” the ambassador told Magnesium Photos, explaining that the country seldom experiences any quakes, and those that do happen generally measure between two and three on the Richter scale.

In response to a question from Magnesium regarding looting in the aftermath of the tragedy, he said that there were “no reports of looting—nobody is going out. It is flattened.”

Official estimates on fatalities vary from the tens of thousands to as much as a hundred thousand. “I think it would be much more,” he added, given that Port-au-Prince is a densely populated city of more than two million people. Much of the city is comprised of poorly-constructed buildings. However, even the national palace, described by Bordes as being designed to be “bomb-proof,” along with other buildings of superior construction, “all fell down.”

We are so fragile… I cannot talk too much about it. It bleeds my heart.

Basic utilities such as water, electricity and telephone services have been severely compromised. Bordes has been unable to communicate with his government and has received no official word from the country’s president, but stated that he believed him to be alive. His main sources of information have been friends living outside of Haiti and foreign news websites.

He further related that he had heard nothing of the quake until a friend in Panama emailed him to ask of his family. He thought the email a joke and replied accordingly. Later, news of the unimaginable devastation reached him, though he has yet to receive any official communiqué from his government. Telephone service is spotty at best, and when he was finally able to reach the national palace, he could not get to anyone in charge on the phone and eventually had to hang up in frustration. Most calls, he told reporters, were greeted with the message “Due to the earthquake damage in the area you are calling, there is no communication.”

Bordes reported that the Toussaint Louverture International Airport was largely undamaged and functioning, although the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that it has closed, a move likely to severely hamper relief efforts. The impassible roads made travel even to Pétionville, a suburb of Port-au-Prince a few kilometers away, impossible. (Pétionville was the site of a tragic school collapse in 2008, in which 93 people, mostly children, were confirmed killed, and over 150 injured, due to shoddy building construction.)

Bordes described hospitals and schools filled with the bodies of victims, and bodies lying in the streets, in addition to the countless dead and injured buried in the rubble.

“We are so fragile,” he concluded. “I cannot talk too much about it. It bleeds my heart.”